Brigadier General Abdul Raziq has been appointed the new police chief of Kandahar. We like the General. We like his style. He gets things done. We give Abdul Raziq a lot of press:
Border police chief for the south, Brig. Gen. Abdul Raziq Achakzai, talks to media in the capital city of southern Kandahar province on Thursday. PAJHWOK
Kandahar new police commander general Abdul Raziq has confidently taken up his new role two months after his predecessor was killed by the Taliban. NATO TV
U.S. Lt. Col. William Clark, second from left, talks with Gen. Abdul Raziq, the border police commander for southern Afghanistan, during a joint patrol near Pakistan on Friday. AP
"He's like this Robin Hood figure who appears from nowhere, takes money and uses it to meet [the people's] needs," said Lt. Col. Andrew Green, the commander of a U.S. Army infantry battalion in Spin Boldak. Washington Post
"He's become a folk hero," says U.S. Army Col. Jeffrey Martindale, commander of the 1st Brigade, 4th Infantry Division, the American unit responsible for Kandahar city and Arghandab. "Afghans see him as the Afghan solution to their problems." Wall Street Journal
Follow after the swirly mess, for more about our confident folk hero. We'll get back to U.S. Colonel Jeffrey Martindale, when we get back to those obliterated towns.
Talibans Shot from Trees
"If you need a mad dog on a leash, he's not a bad one to have," said a U.S. official in Kandahar. Washington Post
Our mad dog on a leash, Brigadier General Abdul Raziq, was once attacking a neighborhood. His troops spotted a stolen police truck. So someone from the General's personal guard shot the stolen truck with an RPG. The RPG bounced off the truck and up into a tree. Where it hit a Taliban suicide bomber who was hiding there. The Taliban suicide bomber fell out of the tree and hit the ground, where his suicide vest exploded. The stolen truck got blown up by this. Mission accomplished. Washington Post reporters Joshua Partlow and Karin Brulliard tell this tall tale about the folk hero as if it were true. Wall Street Journal reporters Yaroslav Trofiov and Matthew Rosenberg do the same. Our military recounts and trades this tale with approval. Something about Abdul Raziq and loose cannons bouncing around strikes them as amusing. We like the General's style. The General is effective.
The General's Style, Part 1
Brigadier General Abdul Raziq owns Spin Boldak, the border town on the Khojak pass into Pakistan, and near Kandahar. Raziq is the Border Police. Many hundreds of trucks each day bring consumer goods through the Khojak pass. It's a complicated trade. Some of it comes in from Pakistan, and then heads right back out:
Boldak is a special sort of border town. The big business there is cars—right-hand-drive cars, to be precise, used cars bought mainly in Japan and shipped in duty-free via Dubai. Afghanistan is a left-hand-drive country, but the vehicles are intended for Pakistan. They are sent overland from Karachi in sealed containers, unpacked in Spin Boldak, and sent right back across the border, with forged papers and baksheesh given to various officials along the way. This may seem like a strange journey, but it’s a simple matter of comparative advantage. Under the Afghan Transit Trade agreement, which dates to 1965, Pakistan allows Afghanistan-bound goods to traverse its territory duty-free. Harpers
The Khojak pass is a choke point on the U.S. supply lines into Afghanistan. It is essential to the war. It is essential to the Surge.
SPIN BOLDAK, AFGHANISTAN -- The pace of President Obama's troop buildup in Afghanistan hinges in part on a narrow, pothole-riddled dirt track that is controlled by a 33-year-old suspected drug lord and by the whims of the Pakistani military. It is down this road each month that thousands of cargo trucks bearing U.S. and NATO military supplies pass through the only major border crossing in southern Afghanistan -- the area where most American troop reinforcements are scheduled to deploy. Washington Post
Ultimately, it was the need to ensure that trucks bearing military equipment could travel to Kandahar unimpeded that led then-Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the former top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, to decide that Razziq could stay. The general traveled to Spin Boldak twice to meet with the self-proclaimed general and deliver a mixed message: You need to help us, and you need to reform. Washington Post
One estimate of Abdul Raziq's take is $5 to $6 million per month.
Corruption at the border crossing is now "total," said Bismullah Kammawie, director general of Afghanistan's customs. Reuters
A Western businessman says his trucking firm pays a local commander from $5,000 to $6,000 for the safe passage of each fuel tanker along the highway, a sum which he suspects the Taliban get a share of. He also claims that in order to ship fuel from Kandahar to a Dutch base at Tirin Kot, the firm hired a local tribal mafioso who boasted of having a strong militia to protect the convoy. The arrangement worked well until the trucking firm quarreled with the mafioso over a price hike. The next convoy was ambushed, two tankers were set ablaze, and drivers reported that several of the mafioso's gunmen were among the Taliban attackers. After that, the trucking firm forked out the extra fees for protection. Time
U.S. support of the corruption, U.S. support of the General, is seen as a cost of keeping our war supplies moving. We like the General. We like his style. We give him a lot of press. The General is a folk hero. He's just like Robin Hood.
How We Found Him
Donald Rumsfeld's plan for Afghanistan was U.S. Special Forces and CIA paramilitaries, in joint operation with local militias. In November 2001, the CIA approached the Achakzai tribe to assemble an army to retake Kandahar province. The Noorzai tribe and the Achakzai tribe have traditionally controlled smuggling in Spin Boldak. The Taliban's victory in Afghanistan originally started in 1994, with the capture of Spin Boldak. Achakzai tribespeople fled to Pakistan. The CIA was paying the Achakzai to come back in against the Noorzai. How a 22-year-old illiterate low-level Achakzai fighter rose to be Brigadier General of the Border Police, controlling for example the customs forms, is shrouded in mystery. What the illiterate fighter is doing in the third photo, showing him consulting with U.S. Lieutenant Colonel William Clark, peering at the Lieutenant Colonel's documents, is something of a mystery too. How the young General came to be old friends with American Ambassadors
“The American ambassador came from Kabul for meetings once,” the provincial official told me, “and he politely shook my hand. When he saw Raziq, he opened up his arms and embraced him like an old friend.” The Star
is further mystery still. But, generally, we liked his style. He gets things done. The U.S. Ambassador is a fan.
The General's Style, Part 2
Brigadier General Abdul Raziq runs his own private prison system. Corrupt warlords can afford such things. Here is an account of how his prisons work:
He has boasted that he prefers to avoid taking prisoners. Those captured alive who have survived detention in Spin Boldak have complained of grave mistreatment. Abdul Ghafar, a 25-year-old farmer, said he was returning home in 2006 when police halted his bus. They singled him out among the passengers and threw him into an unofficial dungeon in Spin Boldak, where he claimed to have been strung up by his ankles and suspended upside-down for long periods. Globe and Mail
We like the General's style. He's a regular Robin Hood.
No One Could Have Predicted
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. has stopped turning over prisoners to Kandahar police. The prisoners would just end up in Abdul Raziq's dungeons. Strung up by their ankles, and stuff.
The U.S. military has banned the transfer of detainees to Afghan authorities in Kandahar while it investigates reports that forces loyal to the powerful provincial police chief have abused prisoners. Military officials imposed the ban in mid-July after receiving what they called "credible allegations" that some detainees had been mistreated while in the custody of Gen. Abdul Razziq's forces. The decision hadn't been made public until now. Arguably the most influential surviving power broker in southern Afghanistan, Gen. Razziq oversaw Afghan border police at a major crossing with Pakistan, where he was long suspected by Western leaders of profiting from legal and illegal supply routes. He presided over an Afghan military force used to clear Taliban redoubts before becoming Kandahar police chief in May. "We have received a lot of negative reports about his behavior and his atrocities and even sometimes torture," said one Afghan official. This Afghan official and a second one said they hadn't received details of the alleged torture. Western officials familiar with the ban declined to discuss the specific allegations. A U.S. military spokesman confirmed Thursday that coalition troops wouldn't hand over prisoners to Afghan officials in Kandahar until they were sure the issue had been resolved. The U.S.-led coalition "takes these allegations very seriously and we want to ensure that the rights and safeguards of the detainees are protected," said U.S. Army Col. Gary Kolb, spokesman for the International Security Assistance Force. Wall Street Journal
ISAF is now taking the private prison allegations "seriously." No one could have predicted? The General's Style, Part 3 The bluntest vote fraud in Afghanistan is highly correlated with areas of low security. And it is especially highly correlated with areas having the highest U.S. military presence.
Observers were anticipating extreme fraud in Kandahar, where what little security exists is dependent on strongmen. The most notable of these is the young Border Police colonel Abdul Raziq, who commands a large, mostly Achekzai militia based out of the key border town of Spin Boldak. In the 2009 presidential elections, Raziq proved that he could deliver vote counts through his commander network that extends through the districts of Maruf, Arghestan, Spin Boldak, Reg, Shorawak, and Daman. This year, he seems to have been elevated, in some respects, to a role in the elections equal to Ahmed Wali Karzai’s. Afghanistan Analysts Network
Spin Boldak district, in the 2009 presidential election, gave 87% of its votes to Hamid Karzai. "Raziq proved that he could deliver vote counts". Ballots were distributed in bundles of 600. Election results can look like this: 5 polling stations, each delivering exactly 600 votes, all to Karzai. Here is a photo from the blog of the Provincial Reconstruction Team leader for Kandahar, visiting Forward Operating Base Spin Boldak, and having a meeting to discuss elections:
Discussing elections with a local politico, a couple of generals, and the Senior Civilian Representative. Jellycow, continued
We like the General's style. He's effective. On election days, Robin Hood strikes again. Destroying the Village in Order to Save It Donald Rumsfeld's plan for Afghanistan was U.S. Special Forces in joint operation with local militias. The current plan for Afghanistan is U.S. Special Forces in joint operation with local militias.
As this partnership has developed, Razziq has been partnered with a U.S. Special Forces commander to help coordinate his moves. He's been called on elsewhere, including particularly treacherous parts of the Argandab valley, where whole villages had been rigged with explosives that had made them impenetrable to previous American units. Washington Post
As promised, here is Colonel Jeffrey Martindale, talking about the towns:
During the Kandahar operation, Americans have unleashed ferocious air bombardments. In some parts of the Argandab, U.S. troops discovered the Taliban had cleared out whole villages and rigged each house with homemade explosives. In one October operation to clear the way for Razziq's troops, American aircraft dropped about 25 2,000-pound bombs and twice as many 500-pound bombs, while also firing powerful rockets over the ridge from the Kandahar Air Field miles away. "We obliterated those towns. They're not there at all," Martindale said. "These are just parking lots right now." Washington Post
We obliterated those towns. They're not there at all. We made the towns into parking lots. To pave the way for the forces of our folk hero, Brigadier General Abdul Raziq.
Further Reading
- The master of Spin Boldak: Undercover with Afghanistan's drug-trafficking border police, Matthieu Aikins, Harpers (December 2009). Aikins visits Quetta, runs into Abdul Raziq's lieutenants there, and manages to tell an amazing story.
- Wedded to the warlords: NATO’s unholy Afghan alliance, Graeme Smith, Globe and Mail, (June 2011). Travels with Paula (I): A time to build, Tom Ricks, Foreign Policy (January 2011). Paula Broadwell, a US army major, assistant and biographer of David Patraeus, describes the razing of villages. A bizarre and chilling read.
- How Short-Term Thinking is Causing Long-Term Failure in Afghanistan, Joshua Foust, Atlantic (January 2011). "Is the U.S. military razing villages in a misguided effort to save them?"
- NATO Is Razing Booby-Trapped Afghan Homes, Taimoor Shah and Rod Norland, New York Times, (November 2010). “We had to destroy them to make them safe.”
- What About the Other War?, Tim McGirk, Time, (February 2003). An early reference to commander Abdul Raziq Achakzai. 250 Marines had dropped from the sky, helping our folk hero to win the battle.